The evolution of enterprise software applications and especially their shift toward service-oriented paradigm demands new ways of architecting systems that we now call service-oriented systems. Several new methodologies or extension of existing ones based on the concept of service and better fitting the current development situations have been proposed and still are under development and experimentation.

The area of method engineering has been researched extensively in the last two decades. Indeed, method engineering has introduced a number of key notions: the product and process aspects of methods, meta-modeling, CAME, method rationale, Situational Method Engineering (SME) etc. In the research community Method Engineering (ME) principles have been promoted as a way to make software development methods agile and adaptable to particular circumstances of a development team and project.

The main audiences of our research reported in this paper are those specific groups of software developers who are Method Engineers or Process Engineers. Generally, method engineers are responsible to construct, tailor, and maintain software processes for use in a wide-range of software projects in a software development organization. In the realm of service-oriented systems, method engineers need a set of domain specific method fragments, as reusable building blocks of methodologies, in order to assemble method fragments together and construct a new project-specific service-oriented methodology. Notwithstanding the multitude of service-oriented development methodologies, the lack of knowledge about service-oriented software development in a well-structured and standard format has long been felt. The proposed method fragments, as methodological knowledge, provide support for method engineers to create knowledge on developing service-oriented systems and share it with other method engineers. Fortunately, OPEN is a good candidate because it provides a standard meta-model for representation of methodological knowledge via autonomous and coherent method fragments.

In addition, from method engineer’s point of view, authors suppose that contributed method fragments represent pivotal activities, rather than traditional software engineering activities and practices. The proposed fragments must be incorporated into the software development process when an inherently complex and dynamic distributed system is being developed and maintained in a service-oriented style. It is generally agreed today that method fragments can capture and represent the knowledge on software processes in a well-structured and reusable format.

The project leaded to this publication started by the postgraduate thesis of Mahdi Fahmideh Gholami in 2008 with the title of “Introducing a Set of Process Patterns for Service-Oriented Software Development”.

Preliminary contributions of authors on the proposed subject matter of this paper presented in conferences are as follows:

The overall contribution went through 2 major and 1 minor revisions and finally has been accepted in SoSyM. The editor and reviewers provide us comprehensive and constructive comments that made the final manuscript much more elaborated than the first submission.

We hope that our method fragments finally lead to the OPEN repository maintaining by the not-for-profit OPEN Consortium, an international group of over 35 methodologists, academics, CASE tool vendors and developers.